Hello I've just registered to comment on your writing (and other stuff of this website, of course)

First I introduce myself a bit (I won't tell you my name yet xd) I'm a student of translation in catalonia and i've been doing japanese for 2 years at an incredibly fast velocity at university.

I've nearly finished the basic grammar set by the University of foreign studies of tokyo (we use that book at university) and i already know 350 kanjis. This year we'll finish out 600! In 4 years we're supposed to finish the 1945 joyo kanjis... (too fasttt xd) we really have to study very hard.. but we are supposed to become translators so we need a really high level of japanese when we finish our studies.

Nice to meet youuu!!

JohtoKen wrote:

All of the 教育漢字２年生. If there is anything I should fix (I am completely aware of 工 looking like a T and a _ separately), please let me know.

To you, i should say... that you shouldn't write so square-shaped, that shows you probably write slow and trying to make it perfect. Make the strokes as if you were painting, rapid and precise, and if you wirte a lot wou will write them well in the end.

AND an important thing that you've been discussing here: the stroke order is VITAL! It is incredible, but when you write in order, kanjis seem to be prettier. You should learn them that way.

Today at university I tried Shodou (calligraphy) for the first time in my life. I'ts been great and fun. It's a bit difficult the first 3 or so times, with the entrance and ending of the strokes, but the aspect of the written character feels the same as the pretty typographies of PCs, and it's a great practice for proportion and stroke order.

I studied calligraphy for a few months at the NYC Japan Society; our sensei was Inkyou Masako, a calligrapher working in the city. Last fall I moved to Massachusetts and carried with me brushes and kami but I didn't have the time to practice -- I thought of doing it in the weekend but then since it's only free time I have I'd rather study the language.That being said, I loved it. I was very bad at it, but I enjoyed the practice and the teaching. It helped me a lot with stroke order and understanding how a stroke is supposed to start or to end.

1-5 roughly follows what I did for my 2nd grade kanji (very square, acceptable but very generic-looking) while 6-10 is my attempt at trying to write Japanese naturally which sort of led to unevenness, and from what someone said about someone else's writing:

Infidel wrote:my basic advice is to not write Japanese the way you write English. I.e, every character should fill an imaginary square instead of getting squished together sideways. Generally, you want the same amount of white space on all four sides of a character.

It's pretty hard to find a balance, though I hope it's acceptable, considering that I've also seen Japanese handwriting before that doesn't look like it was fixed-width.

Sorry for being so late, but I have just seen that you, Johtoken, have miswritten the katakana mi, you have to write the strokes to the right, and not to the left.

By the way, tomorrow i think is time to post my handwriting here. I also bought a brush pen, but it's more difficult to write with it. I think I'll write with both in a paper and later let's see if I can post my pic.

As I said, I post my handwriting in pen and in brush pen. You can't se what it says in the full sentence because I usually write in small letters and I can't write in big ones.

Because I couldn't post the images because it said the size is too big, I could only find the solution of putting them in Megaupload, after some failed attempts to reduce the size: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=95AEBOOA

Just use MS Paint to manually reduce the size and save it as a .jpg; that will cut the file size down significantly. Or get a photobucket account; if you upload pictures to that it will automatically size them down to a reasonable size and you can then directly link to them so that the images appear in the thread.

Thanks a lot ^^My Kanjis look pretty good I think, but I've been writing for 2 years a looooottt of things in Japanese, and taking class notes in Japanese, and writing a lot of compositions, but this is not the reason why they look good.

My kanjis looked as bad as any other foreigner's, but I copied the style that my native teacher has when she writes, I literally copied her technique (she does shodo), and the kanjis just started to look better.

If you want tips: you just have to write with quick strokes, and if you write in a kind of italics, as in my picture (you can see horizontal strokes are kind of inclinated), they look nice and native. And of courseee, a lot of practice. When I study, like 30 or 40 kanjis per test, I start writing words in a paper until nothing else can be written, and I usually fill like 3 or 4 papers.

You should try and post here the results ^^, and I hope to you all that you improve and get nice language skills and nice writing ^^

Mür wrote:You should try and post here the results ^^, and I hope to you all that you improve and get nice language skills and nice writing ^^

Thanks! I haven't written much in Japanese lately because it's so much easier to use the computer and IME. But I'll practice and will definitely post something. 楽しみにしてくださいね!!I think I'll have to go to my husband's office and use his scanner.

It's quite difficult, because if you press too much.. you know what happens xdd. I have to write in a special way, without pressing at all and much more slower, nothing to do like when I write in pencil or pen. But well, in shodo you also write muuuuuuch more slower (really slow)